Fatherhood of God
By Jerry Batson, Th.D.
Special to The Alabama Baptist
Jesus made the vital connection between prayer and the Fatherhood of God in the model prayer He gave His first followers. When they requested He teach them to pray His response was, “When you pray say: Our Father in heaven” (Luke 11:1–2). Addressing God as “our Father” has a double connotation.
First it connotes a special familial relationship with God in which He is Father and we are children. In this relationship we are privileged to think of God as jointly the Father of Jesus and of us. Jesus’ use of “our” conveys the sense of God being our Father and His Father.
Prayer is thus connected with our kinship with Christ in which He teaches us to think of God as His Father in the ultimate or eternal sense as well as our Father in a derived or redemptive sense.
Thus the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer emphasizes a spiritual kinship with God through Christ in which the Father of our Lord also is our Father who is in heaven.
Spiritual kinship
The other implication of thinking of God as “our Father” is that of our spiritual kinship with every other believer regardless of location, time, language, ethnicity, geography, gender and such. We are together in the same family and share the same privilege of access to the same Father through the same practice of prayer.
Jesus was noted for the intimacy He shared with the Father often referring to Him in the familiar family language of “Abba.” As often explained this term is roughly equivalent to the familiar family name “Daddy.” Through Christ we have access to God in terms of a warm, intimate and familiar relationship while remembering God is all-powerful, all-knowing and ever-present.
Worshipful awe
At its best our praying holds in mind both God’s otherness and His gracious nearness to us as His family.
Worshipful awe and respect join in close fellowship and access when we engage in prayer to the One who is both our Father and the awesome God of eternity.
A kind of sidebar to God’s fatherhood is that as our perfect Heavenly Father He knows what we need before we ask just as Jesus reminded the disciples before giving them the Model Prayer: “Your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him” (Matt. 6:8).
A further implication of praying to our all-knowing and loving Heavenly Father is that we can confidently pray like Jesus did when He asked, “Not My will but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42).
EDITOR’S NOTE — Jerry Batson is a retired Alabama Baptist pastor who also has served as associate dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University and professor of several schools of religion during his career.
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